Post
by Albert H » Fri May 17, 2024 6:51 pm
The history of commercial radio in the UK is a sad one.
The very first commercial station (in Oct 1973) was LBC - simulcasting a news and comment service on 97.3 MHz FM and on AM 1152 kHz. In the early days, it provided a superb news service, which was branded as "Independent Radio News", and later sold "down the line" to other UK commercial radio stations.
The next station - a few weeks later - was Capital Radio, again simulcasting on FM and AM. The early days of Capital were characterised by some experimental programming and - during this earliest period - it was a pretty exciting commercial pop station.
Other stations sprang up around the country - Hallam in Yorkshire, Orwell in Ipswich, City in Liverpool and BRMB in Birmingham. Many more followed....
Many of the stations began to suffer financially during the 80s, and the first changes of ownership began. Subtle consolidation of stations began into radio "Groups". The ownership rules became blurred, with Chrysalis (a record company) buying up several stations. IMAP *(a publishing company) bought up a number of stations, and other companies sprang up to buy up as many stations as they could. The early "independent" operations were all subsumed into these various media conglomerates.
It must be noted that many of the new owners of the stations were the types of company specifically barred from station ownership under the original Commercial Radio rules - record companies, advertising agencies, publishing companies and so on were all specifically banned by the rules in an effort to prevent cross-media ownership. Ownership from outside the UK was also banned, but Clear Channel (a huge American media conglomerate) bent the rules by setting up "nominee" companies to own the stations on their behalf.
The IBA and - later on - OFCOM (both of whom were meant to uphold the rules) were very obviously corrupted by the big media companies. The ownership rules were tweaked, the advertising time per hour was increased radically, and commercial radio in the UK collapsed into its current abysmal state.
DAB just allowed more of the same rubbish. It started quite well, with the "serious" music services having high data rates to allow pretty good broadcast quality in areas of good coverage, but soon enough the data rates were reduced, until now we have "music" stations transmitting at 64 kb/s in mono - quality roughly as good as a crappy cassette tape played down a telephone!
UK commercial radio is virtually worthless these days. Audiences were first diluted, then diminished, as the quality of programming fell to worse than Hospital Radio standards.
It's just a matter of time before the expensive transmitters are turned off as "uneconomical". A truly sad state of affairs.
"Why is my rig humming?"
"Because it doesn't know the words!" 
, you have the greatest hits taking over all the local radio transmitters to provide a national station, then think there is also hits radio, i've heard people talking about else were, it seems to be the remaining commercial radio transmitters that its going to be using, maybe keeping the old rds names for now.
